Gypsy Guillén Kaiser

Gypsy Guillén Kaiser is CPJ’s advocacy and communications director. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, she began her career as a journalist after graduating from New York University.

Last week, as Egypt plunged deeper into political violence,
CPJ recorded a sad statistic: the death of the 1,000th
journalist in the line of duty since we began keeping records in 1992. While
that benchmark death came amid a military raid, seven out of 10 killed journalists
were in fact murdered in
reprisal for their work-- and the killers have evaded justice in almost all of
those cases, our research shows.

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Among
the more 200,000 Pakistanis living in London is Altaf Hussain, leader of the
Muttahida Qaumi Movement. This powerful political party is widely thought to be behind the murder of reporter Wali Khan Babar,
a rising star at Geo TV who was shot dead in Karachi in 2011. His coverage
focused on politically sensitive topics such as extortion, targeted killings,
electricity thefts, land-grabbing, and riots.

Online penetration in Venezuela has increased in
recent years, with 40 percent of its population online, according to the
International Telecommunication Union. A significant amount of activity takes
place on Twitter, where Venezuela has the highest penetration in the region
after Uruguay, according to local research company Tendencias Digitales. President Hugo Chávez Frías, who has more than three million
followers on Twitter, uses the platform regularly to convey official news--as he
did on Tuesday when a raging fire at an oil refinery was extinguished, leaving 48
people dead, according to a report on EFE.

As he exited his car and entered the performance center, the
man in the dark pinstriped suit caught the attention of a few people, who
trailed after him. The small crowd greeted him respectfully and
enthusiastically, as someone they felt they had known all their lives. In
return he shook hands calmly and asked the names of his greeters. He was veteran
television news anchor and reporter Dan Rather.

Rather is this year's recipient of the Committee to Protect
Journalists' Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in
defending press freedom. At an event Thursday commemorating CPJ's three decades
of battling for free expression, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Rather
was interviewed by PBS's Gwen
Ifill, where he discussed today's challenges to independent journalism as
well as his own career.

Everyone
at some point has needed someone to stand up for them. These people shine in our
memories for gestures or actions taken on our behalf, whether as children against the
schoolyard bully or as adults in favor of a scholarly proposition or
professional advance. But an especially powerful embodiment of an advocate is
that of an attorney who uses the law, even where individuals have few rights, to
argue for the freedom or survival of those who are oppressed. Nasrin Sotoudeh
is such an advocate, and on April 26 her courage, determination, and
professionalism as a writer, lawyer, and human rights activist in Iran will be
honored with the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith
Freedom to Write Award. Sotoudeh, who has served as legal counsel for several
journalists imprisoned in Iran, was sentenced in January to 11 years in prison.

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CPJ
founders and board members along with supporters and friends filed into
Columbia University's Italian Academy on Thursday for a series of events to
mark the 30 years of CPJ's existence. The celebration started with a 20-minute
sneak peek at a feature-length documentary about CPJ that will be released
later this year.

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Journalists
rarely report on themselves. But in 1981, when two of them heard about a Paraguayan
reporter who had been arrested and was facing a potential prison term simply
for reporting the news, they were convinced that it was time to act. It was this
desire to help a colleague under threat that was the seed that spawned the
Committee to Protect Journalists. Since then, CPJ has grown to a fully staffed
organization advocating globally for press freedom.

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Just before a new round of nuclear talks with Iran began on
December 6, the German newspaper Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung interviewed a high-ranking Iranian official who indicated
that two German journalists detained in Iran would possibly be allowed to spend
the Christmas holiday with their families at the German Embassy.

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The line of people at the stairs leading down to the Great Hall at Cooper Union
in lower Manhattan formed early and turned into an audience of 500. They came to
hear prominent Mexican and U.S. writers and free expression advocates assess,
denounce, and seek solutions to the wave of violence wracking Mexican media.

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"Tell them not to kill me!"
pleads a man in the opening lines of a fascinating tale of violence with the same
title by one of Mexico's
most esteemed writers, Juan Rulfo. It is, sadly, the same cry for help that
Mexican journalists are sending out to the world today. On Tuesday, October 19,
prominent writers and journalists from Mexico
and the United States will
gather in New York for "State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico," an evening of readings and discussions
about the threats facing members of the Mexican press who report on drug-related
violence.